Richard Maun

Tag: How To

  • How To Make A New Year’s Resolution

    It's okay to go your own way next year.
    It's okay to go your own way next year.

    With the New Year looming it becomes traditional to make a pile of resolutions, in order to get the next twelve months off to a good start. In my experience they’re easier to make than to keep.

    I can think of resolutions that I was only making because other people were telling me to start/stop/do more/do less and so on. I wasn’t making them because I wanted to make a change and so they weren’t kept.

    That’s the thing with decisions, if we go against our own energy then we will either work hard to unwind the decision, or just grit or teeth and have a miserable time. Neither of these options seems like a good way to start a freshly minted year.

    So, I have two tips for anyone who needs to make a decision as the Old Year slips by and the New Year waves a cheery hello:

    1. Make your decision when you want to and not because the clock is counting down to midnight. A resolution can wait a couple of days, until you’re properly ready.
    2. Follow your energy. If you don’t really want to, then don’t say you will. Do the things that you genuinely want to do for yourself.

    And if you’re not successful…there’s always next year….

  • How To Access Intuition

    Positron emission tomography is one thing you could do
    Positron emission tomography is one thing you could do

    Intuition is a great asset and much undervalued. We often don’t admit to knowing what we really know we know. We prefer to keep collecting information, or to keep making little adjustments, when all the time we’ve had the answer. We’ve caught ourselves in a little loop of anti-intuition, where more ‘facts’ will ease the risk of making a bad choice, or of making a mistake. This is plainly silly and we can trust ourselves; we can trust our intuition.

    One way to access our intuition is to go for a sense of what we would like, rather than an absolute (which of course craves more facts). Within a cloud of thoughts there will tend to be a perfect little snow flake of reason, that can be picked out and used to prompt an action.

    When working as a coach I often ask clients:

    “What would you like to do first? What’s your sense?”

    Invariably they give me an answer that draws heavily on their intuition and I often follow this up with:

    “That’s great; you can do that!”

    …And they smile and relax. So, the next time a colleague of yours is stuck and you have a hunch that they do know the answer, bypass the data and give them permission to give you a sense of things…their apparent fuzziness will be sharper and more accurate than they will realise.

    I used this approach recently and my client ‘discovered’ a complex Lean Implementation Plan already stored in their head. They could now stop data gathering and start focusing on action. Their intuition on where to start was right, they just needed a hand to access it and a friendly smile from me to begin trusting it.